


Count The Graves (You're In Mine Too)

by clotpolesonly, RsCreighton



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Canon Universe, Dissociation, M/M, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Post-Nogitsune, Post-Nogitsune Stiles Stilinski, Post-Resurrection Peter Hale, Touch-Starved Peter Hale, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-07-10 02:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19898377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clotpolesonly/pseuds/clotpolesonly, https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton
Summary: “I never thought about…” Stiles licked his lips, feet shifting. His next words tumbled out of his mouth the same way he’d tumbled down the stairs, ungraceful and off-balance.“How did it feel?”Though his earlier flare of amusement was doused by the familiar itch creeping along his skin, Peter allowed a small smile to tug at his lips. “Dying, being dead, or coming back?”“Any of it.” Stiles shrugged. “All of it.”





	Count The Graves (You're In Mine Too)

**Author's Note:**

> my first time writing Steter! how exciting, haha. I gotta admit, it almost killed me, but that might just be my natural aversion to things that don't neatly resolve XD
> 
> anyway, it was a great challenge, and I'm so beyond excited to collaborate on a podfic for it!!

  


Your browser doesn't support streaming with the HTML5 audio tag, but you can still [download this podfic (MP3)](https://rscreighton.rosejcreighton.com/2019/08/TeenWolf_Count_The_Graves.mp3).

The pack meeting wasn’t really a pack meeting, as such, if only because it was hardly a unified pack. It was more a handful of barely aligned children and a few tentative allies, none of whom knew where they stood with one another.

Honestly, Peter wasn’t even sure why he was there; he was fairly certain he fell into neither category. But he’d been in the neighborhood when Derek texted, and he didn’t have any other plans for the day, so he’d seen no reason not to comply with the summons. If nothing else, watching the kiddies fumble around in the dark was always entertaining.

He had to admit, though, that the pervasive pall of grief and melancholy did put a damper on things. It was only a week or two since the Argent girl and that twin Peter had never bothered to learn the name of had been killed. There wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t reek to high heaven with pained chemosignals.

Well, besides Peter himself.

Even Derek was subdued, and he hadn’t exactly been Allison’s biggest fan. Scott, pale and round-shouldered, couldn’t seem to meet anyone’s eye. Lydia was looking far more fragile than Peter knew her to be. Isaac was sticking oddly close to Argent’s side—an interesting development—and the little kitsune wouldn’t stop fidgeting, obviously unsure of her welcome here without Scott to hold her hand.

And then there was Stiles. Quieter than Peter had ever seen him, and unusually still, tucked away on the spiral staircase, radiating guilt and shame that Peter could smell even from across the room.

Peter didn’t pay much attention to what was being said. There was no current threat that he need concern himself with, and a lackluster exchange of mundane information between the pack’s former and current alphas was hardly thrilling. Much more rewarding to watch the way Scott cringed whenever Isaac looked his way, how Chris’s hand on Isaac’s shoulder seemed to soothe the young werewolf, the miniscule flinch Lydia couldn’t hide whenever her eyes landed on Stiles.

The meeting ended without much fanfare. Peter would’ve called it a waste of time if he’d had anything else more important to be doing, but with his dance card currently empty, there was only so much he could complain about.

The others filed out of the loft in pairs: Kira falling in at Lydia’s side like Allison’s absence there was a hole that needed to be filled; Scott and Isaac, fists in their pockets and jaws clenched around words unspoken; Derek and Chris, talking quietly because somehow, in all the mess, they’d managed to stumble into some kind of bizarre partnership.

It wasn’t until the heavy metal door clanged shut that Peter realized he wasn’t the only one left behind.

Stiles remained on the stairs, head down. It didn’t look as if he’d moved once in the last half hour, but, as Peter sidled a bit closer, he saw that he was wrong. Stiles wasn’t motionless, only subdued. His fingers were tapping against his knees. One hand and then the other, over and over again, finger by finger. If Peter strained his ears, he could hear the barest brush of lips, words being formed but no sound coming out.

“That’s insanity, you know.”

Stiles gave a rather violent startle. It seemed to take a moment for Peter’s words to process, but when they did, the last of the color drained from Stiles’ face. He had to clear his throat before he could force out a hoarse, “What?”

Peter nodded at Stiles’ hands, still splayed out against his thighs. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” he said. “Besides, aren’t you a little old to be counting on your fingers? Or has algebra been dumbed down since I was in school?”

Stiles’ eyes dropped to his lap like he had forgotten what was there. His hands shook before he curled them into fists. “No,” he said. “I’m not— It’s not for—”

Peter cocked his head, eyebrow raised, and red seeped into Stiles’ pale cheeks. His jaw clenched tight, a muscle there leaping with the tension of it, and he forced himself to his feet instead of answering. He wasn’t exactly steady on them. The staircase’s railing took most of his weight on the way down and he stumbled when he reached the base. Before he’d taken even two steps, his hands were up again, fingers splayed.

He was definitely counting this time. Peter recalled Derek making some mention of finger counting—a method for distinguishing dreams from reality, or something along those lines. Whatever it was, it wasn’t working very well, judging by the stench of anxiety and exhaustion that clung to Stiles’ skin.

Upon reaching ten, Stiles seemed to remember Peter’s presence. He also seemed to finally notice the distinct lack of everyone else. He swallowed.

“Where did everybody go?”

“They left,” Peter informed him. “Obviously.”

Stiles’ heart rate spiked. But whether it was because he was alone with Peter with no one to protect him or because he had clearly been so deep in a fog as to have missed his friends’ departure completely, Peter couldn’t tell.

“Right,” he said faintly. “Yeah, of course. I knew that.”

“Of course,” Peter echoed him.

It was a lie and both of them knew that. It was in the smoothness of Peter’s tone and the deeper flush to Stiles’ face. It was in the way Stiles’ hands rubbed together, kneading at his palms and sliding up. It was in how he gripped his own forearms until his fingertips went white and bloodless under the pressure.

“I just wasn’t—” Another thick swallow.

He couldn’t keep his eyes off of his own hands for more than a few seconds; they darted nervous-quick around the room like a caged bird, but they always came back to where they started, and he stared at them like he had never seen them before. Like they were a stranger’s.

An itch settled between Peter’s shoulder blades, disconcerting in its familiarity. He didn’t bother trying to scratch it, not like Stiles did, all questing fingers and a restless, desperate energy that sat just below the skin. Scratching had never done him any good, just like the counting was doing Stiles no good now.

Instead he said, “Three weeks.”

Again, Stiles jumped. “What?”

Tucking his own strange hands into the pockets of his trousers, Peter leaned his shoulder against the staircase’s central column. “Three weeks,” he repeated. “That’s how long I was dead.”

Stiles stared at him.

“How long my body—” The itch intensified, crawling over Peter’s neck like a line of ants. He rolled his shoulder against the sensation, for all the good it did him. “—didn’t belong to me.”

It took a moment to sink in, and then Stiles’ eyes went wide. They skated down the length of Peter’s form and back up again like he was seeing it all for the first time. It was almost funny considering Stiles had heavily contributed to killing him back then; he was more than aware of Peter’s time beyond the metaphorical veil.

And yet.

“I never thought about…” Stiles licked his lips, feet shifting. His next words tumbled out of his mouth the same way he’d tumbled down the stairs, ungraceful and off-balance.

“How did it feel?”

Though his earlier flare of amusement was doused by that creeping itch, Peter allowed a small smile to tug at his lips. “Dying, being dead, or coming back?”

“Any of it.” Stiles shrugged. “All of it.”

Peter breathed in deep and slow. He let the air settle in his lungs for a moment, long enough for the tremor in his pocketed hands to still and the itch to creep a bit more. Long enough for Stiles to shift on his feet again, darting a look at the loft door. Contemplating making a run for it, perhaps, or hoping for Derek or one of the others to come back for him. But he didn’t bolt, and nobody came back.

Stiles fixed his gaze on Peter again, sharp, now, and expectant.

“Dying hurt,” Peter told him. “Being dead was a unique torture, yet not a painful one. Not really. But coming back? That was…” He shook his head. “… _agony._ ”

Stiles’ throat worked around another swallow. To his credit, he didn’t look away, even as Peter pushed off of the column and stepped forward into his space.

“For the briefest of moments,” Peter said, “I knew what it was to be a living corpse. Feeling the putrefaction and desiccation of what had once made me. Flesh dried up and fallen away, muscles too decayed to move. The squirm of the maggots in my chest cavity and the buzz of flies in my gut.”

Peter was near enough now to see the way Stiles shuddered, the gooseflesh that arose along the bare expanse of his forearms where his shirtsleeves were rolled up. Still, he didn’t turn away, eyes fixed unerringly on Peter’s. In the afternoon light streaming through the wall of windows, they were a bright, clear amber. Almost gold.

Though Stiles’ gaze was steady, his voice wavered. “Sounds awful.”

Peter didn’t bother to nod. Instead he said, “It raises a philosophical question or two. Am I truly alive at all? Or am I simply a ghost possessing my own reanimated corpse? And what, quite frankly, is the difference?”

“You look alive to me,” Stiles offered, for whatever it was worth, a sad attempt at a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“And you look real to me.”

Stiles blinked. His smile disappeared, chased away by a rush of chemosignals that stung Peter’s nose like rancid sweat and old pennies. The scratch of his fingernails against his jeans was loud in the silence between them.

“Do you still feel it? All of the—” One trembling hand flew through the air, vague and all-encompassing.

The itch was like radio static made sensate. It chased itself over Peter’s body until claws pressed at his fingertips, ready to tear his skin off and cast it aside. Did he really need it? He had existed nearly a month without it, after all, and it without him.

But Stiles was watching him.

“Yes.”

Stiles ran a hand over his mouth, dragging it away with a heavy breath. “I still feel like I’m trapped sometimes,” he said in a rush. “Like I’m locked away in some hole in the back of my mind, _screaming_ at myself to move, and nothing happens because it’s not me— _I’m_ not me—and I’m just waiting for—for something _else_ to—”

“There is nothing else, Stiles. Not anymore.”

“But there’s no _me_ either!”

Stiles’ voice broke under the weight of those words. They were heavy enough to knock the wind out of Peter too, to hit him hard in the chest where once had been a maggot-filled hollow. They squirmed there like so many insects, digging into the meat of him that had been dust not too long ago. His mouth was dirt-dry, tongue thick and heavy. He barely felt the prick of claws against his palms, the distant sound of his own racing heart too hard to make out with Stiles’ damning words in his ears.

The snarl on his lips slurred his words as he said, “Of course there is. You’re _here,_ aren’t you?”

He grabbed hold of Stiles’ wrist, dragging it up between them. The only resistance he met was Stiles’ surprise. In that instant, all Stiles’ fretful motion ceased and there was nothing between them but a scant few inches and their harsh breaths to fill them.

They had been in this position before. Dead of night in an empty parking garage. Bared teeth and an offer rejected. Stiles had been still then, too, but nothing like this where it seemed that every molecule of him had frozen in place at Peter’s touch. Only his eyes continued to move, roving Peter’s face, now so close to his own.

“Whatever body this is,” Peter said, the full weight of Stiles’ gaze drawn to his mouth like a lodestone to true north, “it’s _yours_ now. Who cares where it came from or what it’s made of? This body belongs to _you._ It obeys _you._ It—”

Stiles shook free of his grasp, his hand flying to the back of Peter’s neck, jerking him forward, and the next second, Stiles’ lips were on his.

The kiss hardly lasted long enough for Peter to register it for what it was. Everything in him ground to a halt—thoughts quieted, breath held, even that damnable itch suddenly gone—and Peter stared.

Stiles stared back, all wide, amber eyes and pink, parted lips. His tongue flicked out to wet them. Peter followed the motion of it.

“Why did you do that?”

With how close they were, even a whisper felt too loud. It was a long moment before Stiles answered him, filled with only the puff of Stiles’ breath on his face and the heat of his hand on Peter’s skin.

“I don’t know. I guess I just…needed to know that I could.”

When Peter didn’t respond, the hand on his neck clenched tight, just for a second. And then it began to retreat. Before it could slip away completely—before he could think better of it; before he could think at _all_ —Peter caught hold of it. He was left with Stiles’ fingertips a barely-there presence against his throat.

By all accounts, it should have felt like a threat; he’d had his throat slashed before, claws sunk in and torn out to leave him drowning in his own blood. But it didn’t. The pads of Stiles’ fingers were callus-rough and they sent a shiver through Peter that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that it had been a long time since anyone had touched him like this.

Slowly, he pressed Stiles’ palm flat against his vulnerable throat. His pulse leapt against the weight of it, frantic and steady and strong.

Dead hearts didn’t beat.

Peter was the one to close the distance this time. The rush of heat through his veins was stronger than any itch and he swallowed Stiles’ gasp like he was drawing his first breath.

Stiles kissed like he was drowning. He clawed at Peter’s shoulders as if they weren’t already flush together and arched into the slide of Peter’s arm around his waist. His tongue was slick in Peter’s mouth, hungry and insistent, and Peter took it in. He took all of him in, nerve endings alight, buzzing with the touch of skin on skin.

The backs of Stiles’ thighs hit the table, wood legs clattering against concrete floor. The noise was startlingly loud in the empty loft and he broke away from the kiss to pant against Peter’s lips.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, we can’t. We can’t do this.”

Peter glanced down at Stiles’ fist, twisted into the front of his shirt. “I assure you, we can.” He covered Stiles’ hand with his own. Neither of them were shaking anymore. “You can do anything you want with your own body. Isn’t that what you were out to prove?”

“Yes, but I—”

“Doesn’t it feel good?” Peter leaned in, bracing himself on the table’s edge, and dragged his nose along the line of Stiles’ neck. The scent of anxiety was overrun now with pheromones, sweet and potent, like melted sugar. “Doesn’t it make you feel…”

_Alive._

Stiles shuddered under him, but the fist in his shirt flattened against his chest to push him back. “I can’t.”

He slid past Peter, unsteady legs carrying him toward the door. Peter swallowed a growl. A chill like the grave seeped in everywhere that Stiles was no longer touching him and his nails dug divots into the table’s surface, claws barely held at bay.

“Stiles.”

The boy stopped, head down and shoulders hunched. Already his nervous fingers were tapping. Peter almost wanted to laugh, but the dirt in his lungs clogged his throat.

“Go back to your counting, if you want to,” he said. “That’s your choice. But don’t expect a different result.”

Stiles’ fingers stilled.

A moment later, the door rumbled shut in his wake and Peter was left alone.


End file.
